I pretty much agree with Dahbomb on the worst hypers, though I'm not entirely sure on Firebrand's Level 3. Don't really know what it can or can't do. I tend to forget he even has a level 3. I only ever hear people talk about his unblockable.
Allow me to fill you in.
Chaos Tide Pros:
+Lasts ~600 frames, a decent amount of time.
+With decent execution and an immobile opponent, will put out about 400K in chip damage.
+Allows you to build meter while it's up.
+Provides unique combos.
+Allows Firebrand to set up solo unblockables.
+The helper is powered up by Luminous Body.
Chaos Tide Cons:
-The helper has 3 inputs, and only the H input is good. The L input is a tiny, tiny projectile that fires at an angle that requires him to be in a specific position, and the M input can be dodged simply by ducking with almost any character in the game.
-The unique combos don't do significantly more damage than normal combos, and are inconsistent.
-The helper doesn't auto-correct after swooping, so if you try to set up the solo unblockable, it might just start shooting fireballs in the wrong direction (seriously).
-If your opponent superjumps, he/she is completely free from worrying about the helper. If your opponent can delay in the air, you might as well have not used this at all unless you were able to start it up while your opponent was in a hard knockdown, since the helper needs to work his way across the screen through several H presses to get in on the action.
-Solo unblockables are nearly impossible to do in practice. Basically, you need to use H to put your opponent in blockstun via the helper right as you go into the swoop, and then, while holding H, mash L to make the helper shoot fireballs. If your opponent is moving around intelligently, this pretty much never happens.
-The helper being powered up by Luminous Body is almost a non-issue, because for most teams you never have 4 bars sitting around, and if you do, you probably don't want to spend them on this. Rarely, I'll use 4 bars + X-Factor to finish a match I'm doing really well in, because it locks out most X-Factor cancel problems.
-The helper can't do anything if Firebrand is blocking or getting hit. So, if your opponent decides to burn 3 bars on chip damage in response to you activating Chaos Tide, you just lost 3 bars for nothing.
I use Chaos Tide about 1/5 battles, because Dark Harmonizer gives me so much meter that I can throw it away on something like this. I would never, ever use the hyper if it weren't for my very unique team setup. These days, I generally prefer to just Luminous Body -> Stalking Flare, and then raw tag Firebrand back in, because Firebrand backed by the Stalking Flare is more scary than Firebrand's level 3, and he's boosted when he comes back in.
In other news, sometimes I wish if Amaterasu had all three variants of Cold Shots as her assists. The upward angled one would be especially wonderful.
In early versions of Vanilla, Amaterasu actually had Cold Stars L as an assist, but it was deemed too good and changed to Cold Stars H. Same with Deadpool - he used to have Happy Trigger L or M as an assist, I forget which.
